Comment on A reminder
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 16 hours agoSeriously. My partner and I are millionaires. We’re almost 40 and have a net worth just shy of $2M. We’ve a couple of DINKS. We’re both engineers, are pretty good with numbers, and understand compound interest. We got on the property ladder pretty early. I bought my first townhouse in 2012 pretty much right at the bottom of the housing market. We’ve moved twice since then and have benefited from the full rise in house prices.
Our net worth is a little under $2M. About $10k of that is checking and savings. Another $80k in a taxable brokerage account as an emergency fund. $450k in home equity. The rest is in retirement accounts such as 401ks and IRAs.
We are working class. The closest either of us have ever come to hiring someone is when we’ve hired a plumber or electrician to fix something at our home. I’ve technically owned a business, but just for my own freelance tutoring work. And the closest either of us have ever come to being a landlord was when I had a couple of roommates at that first townhouse I bought.
We’re doing very well; we have no complaints. And while we’ve achieved some modest amount of wealth, it’s not ultimately about living large or in luxury. We live well below our means. We recently bought the first new car in a quite awhile, a Toyota Corolla. It replaced a 15 year old Corolla that my partner bought new. We buy affordable reliable vehicles and drive them til the wheels fall off.
But again, we’re not trying to get rich. We’re not trying to hoard the largest possible of money we can. We don’t view wealth as a lifetime high score. It’s simply a means to achieve stability and safety. We’re on the path to early retirement. We hope to retire by the time we’re 50. We need to save up a couple of million not because we want to live in luxury, but simply because it’s the only way to have a decent stable and safe retirement in this capitalist hellscape we live in. In a world with universal healthcare and a universal basic income, we would have no need for millions in retirement savings. If my partner and I each brought in say, $20k a year from UBI? If we had a paid off house and also didn’t have to worry about healthcare? We could live quite well off just that $40k per year.
I’m a millionaire and I support much higher taxes on millionaires. I do this because ultimately the point for us for having a couple of million is not to have a couple of million. The point is to have safety and stability in our lives. And the secure the social safety net, the less the need to cover those needs privately.
hamid@crazypeople.online 16 hours ago
You are not working class, you are part of the middle class unlike many Americans who say they are. It is a petit bourgeois class. If you have a net worth of almost 2 million dollars you own capital assets and by definition are not part of the working class.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Petit bourgeois? Our money is all in our house and in retirement assets that are just America’s poor excuse for a pension system. If we’re petit bourgeois, so is every retired school teacher that’s worked long enough to earn a pension.
Petit bourgeois refers to people that have to work but also control their own means of production. Classically this meant artisans, tradesmen, shop owners, etc. People who aren’t having their labor exploited, but also still have to work.
In our careers, we’ve almost always worked regular salary jobs. We’re not immune to job loss. We do not own the means of production. We’ve had our labor surplus siphoned off by employers our whole careers.
That’s the whole point of this discussion. Even most millionaires are just working class people trying to achieve a little bit of stability in their lives.
hamid@crazypeople.online 16 hours ago
Owning the means of production is the capitalist and bourgeois class of which you are below and do the functional work for, the petit bourgeois are professionals like yourself. .8% of the world has a net worth over a million dollars. You are quite literally in the global 1%
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
You are saying that capitalists own the means of production, while “little capitalists” don’t.
I don’t think its useful to lump in high-income professional work with the low end of capital accumulation. The sums may overlap, but the actual class interests don’t, at least not entirely. Good analysis should recognize the distinctions here.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
You can have whatever definition you want. But for me, working class means just that - a person that has earned their bread through the work of their own hands, not through the exploitation of the labor of others, through rent-seeking, or from inheritance.
I’m sure you can cite plenty of theory, but frankly, I don’t care. I prefer a definition of the term centered in lived experience. If you go off raw wealth, you just end up classifying entire nations as working class or bourgeois, at which point the term loses all meaning.
amorpheus@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
That’s true for a lot of people in “first world” countries. One is ahead of billions of poor people basically for existing.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I think you’re thinking of the professional managerial class.